“Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth.” -Buddha***
We mortals are composed of two great schools--Enlightened knaves or else religious fools.
--Abul 'Ala al Ma'arri (973-1057)***
"Life is a banquet, and most poor suckers are starving to death!" -Auntie Mame
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Philosophy, History, Travel, the Arts, Whatever's on my Table...

Barbara Schreiber's recent exhibitionat Callanwolde of thirteen acrylic paintingson paper combined qualities ofmodernism with a postmodern socialconcern and use of symbols. The vieweris immediately aware of the medium,the rich use of color, the exquisite paper—and all the qualities Clive Bell extolledas "Significant Form." Yet, simultaneously,one is aware of the subjectmatter: the disharmony between natureand humanity.At first, looking over the images ofcomic figures in hostile or forebodinglandscapes, one feels indulgence in thepleasure of seeing nature and its forcesshatter the eruptions of humankind.Chicago, Memphis, Biloxi, and PalmBeach are inundated by tidal waves inthe four works that make up "Into theWater." Farm house and city buildingsare equally decimated by nature's mightin Country Weather/City Weather.Other images create variations on thistheme. In Are You Ready For L.A.? thesetting is inviting enough, but the threegrotesque, grinning figures recall bitinggremlins. Fat Boy in the Full Moon suggestsa vital connection between the boyand the moon he resembles. Yet thereare alienation and a faceless uneasinessin the painting.This uneasiness increases the moreclosely one views Schreiber's works. Itcontinues as her images haunt thememory. What was merely comic atfirst takes on a sinister aspect, revealingthe callousness of human vanity and theunnatural evil it produces. This evil isdepicted in Looking Great All the Time,in which the fluff of a newsperson's pastelblond hair is far more important andrequires more attention than the dyingfigures in the disaster she is about to report.Ambulance Chasers with its sinister,ghostly ambulance gaped at bythrill-seeking onlookers reveals a similarevil.Schreiber is able to communicate hersense of nature and human disconnectionon many levels. Her modernism, includingher mastery of color, allows herto work on a subconscious level, usingrich earth colors for nature and sickly,pastel colors for people and what theyhave erected, whether skyscrapers, automobiles,houses, or helicopters. The last,used in two of the paintings, recall thedestructive "choppers" in such Vietnamwar films as Apocalypse Now. Schreiberis also able to use the most basic archetypalsymbols in ways straightforwardand simple enough not to be trite. Thesun, moon, and sea all appear in new aspectsin her paintings. In Pull Sun, for instance,the sun seems diseased, turnedgreen by what is, no doubt, smog fromthe nearby city. The lone sunbather onthe long expanse of beach appears to bedead. Similarly, the pinkish biomorphicfigure Laid Out on a Slope looks like anecological disaster victim dead on aGrant Wood landscape of round, greenhills.The sensually rendered images offer awide range of possible interpretations,allowing humor and allowing horror. Ibegan to imagine that Schreiber desiressome sort of pagan pantheism, longingfor lost rituals that would reconnect uswith sun, moon, sea, and land. Her expressionof the richness of the earth, sky,and water is too loving to be otherwise. Iwonder, though, given the sort of humanityrevealed in the form of ambulancechasers and egoistic newscasters,how we are to avoid ending up, ourselves,like the apparently dead cows lyingprey to the sinister, purple autorounding the slope of A Ride in theCountry.One of Oscar Wilde's famous quipswas that it is nature which imitates art.He meant, of course, that art influencesthe way we see and hence what we see. Ihope in the case of Schreiber's art thatreality does not come to imitate the visionshe renders. Or better, that Schreibercomes in future paintings to presentto us a vision of a humanity worth imitating.Jack MillerJack Miller is visiting professor of philosophyand aesthetics at the Atlanta College of Art.